Cod Almighty | Diary

Do you know who we are?

10 July 2020

Middle-Aged Diary feels obliged to write about salary caps. If you want dancing kittens, I'm told the World Wide Web is full of them. If you want erotic poetry replete with religious imagery, you have probably misread, or maybe misunderstood, the name "Cod Almighty".

You are still here?

Salary caps, depending how they are calculated, divide people according to which of two lazy ways of looking at the world they subscribe to.

First, you have the pundits who have seen the unpublished manuscript of a Hans Christian Anderson story in which a rich man comes upon some poor children playing in a field, evicts them, and pays a travelling circus to take up residence there instead. If your first thought on the days Salford City and Forest Green Rovers played their first matches in the Football League was "fairy tale", you too are in the wrong place. There will be rich owners who will defend to the death their right to take up a community club, pump it up with wealth and refuse to countenance questions about what happens to that club when they die, or their assets go flop, or they just get bored.

If the salary cap is based on turnstile revenue, then there is an instant appeal to the Billy Big Club Bollocks Brigade. (I apologise for the use of "brigade" but the alliteration is too tempting.) We deserve to be allowed to spend money, because we used to be good, and we've got the FA Cup semi-final appearances and the large but groan-laden support to prove it. This is a harder fallacy for Town fans to free themselves from.

In fact, the salary cap the Telegraph reports the fourth flight is considering appears to be a flat £1-1.5 million for everyone. It makes more creditable Town chair Phil Day's support for the notion. It's a level playing field for all, and we all like level playing fields.

Except it won't be a level playing field when we play a cup game against a team with no cap or a higher cap. And it would make end-of-season contract negotiations and squad building that bit harder for the teams that win promotion. They'd be entering into a race on a standing start when their rivals are already up and running.

That is the problem with salary caps. As a means of stopping clubs destroying themselves, they might work, and if they don't at least they'll keep the legal and accounting professions in gainful employment. But they do nothing to address why so many clubs are on the edge of destruction in the first place. In taking a stand against the advantage of the clubs with wealthy backers, they end up entrenching another kind of privilege: that of the clubs who have had years gorging on fatter TV deals.

The case for salary caps is they make sure things get worse a bit more slowly. Perhaps this year of all years, that is what is needed. But it's not the greatest of rallying cries.

You wish you'd checked out those dancing kittens now, don't you.